Evaluation of Smartphone-based Interfaces for Navigation Tasks in Unstructured Environments for Ground Robots

The development of robots that autonomously assist humans is still a challenge in unstructured domestic environments. A practical approach is through teleoperation. Conventional teleoperation uses specialized mechanical devices that provide user-friendly interfaces to operate robots, but these devices might be complex and expensive. In this paper, we compare the performance of three smartphone-based interfaces for robot navigation tasks. First, we show our system setup and our simulated domestic environments, then, we present our three smartphone-based interfaces that leverage the capabilities of ubiquitous smartphones to allow users to operate a domestic robot -PR2- in the simulated environments. Subsequently, we explain the procedure to complete our usability study. In this study, we establish completion time and the path smoothness as objective measurements, and we combine these measurements with a Nasa-TLX evaluation. Finally, we show our usability study results, and we present our conclusions.